An age-old motif courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
